Abstract
An important problem in rural-area supply chains is how to transport the harvested fruit to urban areas. Low- and medium-capacity vehicles are used in Colombia to carry out this activity. Operating them comes with an inherent cost and generates carbon emissions. Normally, minimizing operating costs and minimizing carbon emissions are conflicting objectives to allocate such vehicles efficiently in any of the supply chain echelons. We designed a multi-objective mixed-integer programming model to address this problem and solved it via the ε-constraint method. It includes decisions mainly about quantities of fruit to transport and store, types of vehicles to allocate according to their capacities, CO2 emission levels of these vehicles, and subcontracting on the collection process. The main results show two schedules for allocating the vehicles, showing minimum and maximum CO2 emissions. Minimum CO2 emissions scheme require subcontracting and the maximum CO2 scheme does not. Then, a Pareto frontier shows that CO2 emissions level are inversely proportional to total management cost for different scenarios in which fruit supply was modified.
Highlights
Fresh foods such as fruits are highly perishable, which means their shelf life is limited over time
Food supply chains focus on the quality of the products and the minimization of shipping times or the maximization of the quality of the products in the delivery time, especially due to the challenges associated with seasonality, supply peaks, long delivery times and perishability [3]
The research literature related to the work presented in this article has two aspects: studies of CO2 reduction in the distribution of perishable products in Colombia and supply chain models with restrictions on the reduction of carbon emissions on a general level
Summary
Fresh foods such as fruits are highly perishable, which means their shelf life is limited over time. Given that perishable products reduce its value over time, one of the main objectives in the distribution of these products, especially in the food supply chains, is to attend to their freshness while delivering them to the demand areas This objective creates a direct effect on the response capacity of the network. The mobility dynamics of the country’s capital means that 45% of emissions are generated by land transport, by the transport of cargo and passengers in public transport In this case, the production of CO2, generated because of land transport in Bogotá, is a problem that affects the environment by increasing the greenhouse effect as well as affecting the cost of travel in land transport including the design of the transport network.
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